Word: darwinism
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Falling for Darwin. Racism was rare before the era of colonialism, writes Gossett. People enslaved and oppressed one another, but they seldom justified their action on racial grounds. But in the Victorian age, when white Europeans ruled colored races the world over, racial theories mushroomed. The favorite of these was Social Darwinism, which held that human races evolve like animal species and that the nonwhite races were at the bottom of the evolutionary scale...
...study of skulls, was the rage. Enthusiasts claimed that the bigger the brain cavity, the brighter the person. When Negroes and Chinese turned up with huge brains, racists took to measuring noses. The theory was that the lesser races have longer noses-until it was pointed out that Darwin himself had an exceptionally long nose...
Survival of the Fittest. Even as staunch an admirer as Coleridge found Darwin's poetry "nauseating." Nevertheless, The Botanic Garden, a scientific treatise in rhymed couplets, was a bestseller during his lifetime, and its descriptive lines were vastly admired by many of his contemporaries...
...Darwin had taken the lines, almost word for word, from Anna Seward, and after the poem was published, the Seward-Darwin cat correspondence ended. But The Botanic Garden was so popular that otherwise sober critics judged Darwin a greater poet than Milton...
...told, Erasmus Darwin had 14 children by two wives and one long-suffering mistress. Only one son, Robert, survived to become a doctor, and his lackluster career was a persistent disappointment to his father. But Robert became the father of Charles and Charles made the family name famous. When he advanced his theory of evolution in Origin of the Species, Charles relied partially on his grandfather's investigation of gene mutations described in the treatise Zoonomia...